Self-Awareness, Orientation, and Culture

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

One of the first things a beginning psychology student is taught is that, despite what people think, they actually do not know know themselves very well.  This is a well-established fact.  Who you think you are and who you really are often differ greatly.  In many cases other people know you better than you yourself do.  We must be skeptical when evaluating ourselves, and the quest for self-awareness must be an ongoing struggle.  This is often uncomfortable and it is easier said than done.  But, as Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  While he was talking about scientific integrity, the saying applies to self-knowledge. 

A large part of who you are is how you view the world.  You may think that you the world exists as it appears to you, that you see it and so you understand it. But here you are fooling yourself.  You never objectively observe the world.  An example of this is seen constantly: Two people in the same place, at the same time, witnessing the same event and each having a drastically different account of what occurred . This is because we don't see the world as it is, with perfect knowledge.  We only take in hints (observations) and it is how we interpret those hints that defines our understanding of the world. 

That interpretation is called orientation. And as the late John Boyd described, it is essentially a filter made up of our genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, new information and the analysis and synthesis of information.  All these things act on and manipulate our observations to provide us with our understanding the world around us.

And if you are not aware of how these things affect your understanding, then you are not aware of the limitations of your orientation and where there may be errors that cause a divergence between reality and your understanding of reality, between what you think the world is and what it really is.

So again, we go back to self-awareness.

But how can you assess your own orientation when it is a part of how you view everything, when it is the lens through which all information comes to you?  Didn't Kurt Gödel say that it is impossible to understand the nature of a system from within it?  So, how can you step outside yourself to gain this understanding?

John Boyd points to Edward T. Hall as providing an answer for how to do so, at least for the "cultural traditions" aspect of our own orientation:

"Everything man is and does is modified by learning and is therefore malleable. But once learned, these behavior patterns, these habitual responses, these ways of interacting gradually sink below the surface of the mind and, like the admiral of a submerged submarine fleet, control from the depths. The hidden controls are usually experienced as though they were innate simply because they are not only ubiquitous but habitual as well.

… The only time one is aware of the control system is when things don’t follow the hidden program. This is most frequent in intercultural encounters. Therefore, the great gift that the members of the human race have for each other is not exotic experiences but an opportunity to achieve awareness of the structure of their own system, which can be accomplished only by interacting with others who do not share that system …"
- Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture

So the next time you experience something strange in another culture, take note.  Ask what it is telling you about your own perspective, and get to know yourself better.